HN Reader

I observe how so many of these kinds of release announcements do not start the text with a brief line introducing the project. I had never heard of Kea and clicked through out of curiosity, but that info is yet another click away: Kea is a "Modern, open source DHCPv4 & DHCPv6 server".

I have a positive ending Kea story. We deployed 20,000 PS5 APUs (AKA: AsRock BC-250) each is a individual blade computer that was PXE booted.

We started to see strange behavior on the network and it took a bit of trial and error to figure out what was going wrong. Eventually, we traced it down to dnsmasq being unable to keep up with all the DHCP UDP traffic regardless of how we tuned the kernel/networking buffers.

Switched to Kea and all of our problems magically went away.

What is this? Kea 3.0 has been out for years already :D https://keajs.org/blog/kea-3.0

(I'm the author of a JS framework with the same name)

Back then, I used ISC's DHCP server, but nowadays you have other options like AdGuard Home which includes a nice web UI that is simpler to manage than just a daemon implementation.

I wonder when this will make it into pfsense... The transition to kea has been a bit of a mess with tons of bugs. Thankfully it's controlled by an option, and it seems like 2.8.0 knocked out quite a few of them

ISC DHCPd is (being) EOLed.

Kea is ISC's new DHCP server.

Great to see the hook libraries being mostly open sourced!

I was quite ok with paying the $500 or so to license the features, but the friction to get that through procurement processes also ended up killing it.

Kea is perfect for integrating with zero touch provisioning automation processes.

Good news releasing the commercial extensions as open source too. It opens up new ways of automating operations.

I’ll google it in a moment, but skimming those notes, I have no idea what Kea is.